EE won’t go higher, SWE will go lower
Net result a lot of critical infrastructure and devices suck as much as possible while still getting the job done.
I have found that most of the high end brands have a completely horrible user experience. Miele is the worst I’ve tried, and I found that as you go up the price range even inside that brand the experience gets worse.
The top end Miele induction cooktop takes over 5 seconds to boot up before you can even turn a hob on. The interface has a second of latency on presses. It took me probably 20 seconds to work out how to turn a hob on. I happened to be with my mother at the time and I asked her to try to work out how to turn a hob on and she had failed after 1 minute of trying and gave up and asked me.
It looks nice though.
The thing I find the most infuriating about it is that my attitude towards this stuff is just not understood by designers at all. They complain at my choices because the Miele appliances which they specified are “better quality”. And yet I feel like they can’t have actually tried to use them because as far as I can tell the quality is total garbage.
We opted for a gas hob when we installed our kitchen. Mostly because I like the controllability when cooking. Obviously it's a nightmare for health and the environment but man it makes cooking easier.
I did a survey of all the cooktops/hobs I could find in my city, looking for something that would suit my elderly mum, and I didn’t find a single unit that was usable. Fortunately a salesperson knew of a recently developed “cheap” model from a noname brand, which had individual knobs, so I ordered that, it arrived an month ago so I got it installed, and it has worked very well for my mum.
Usability is not something that most people know to look for when making purchases, so most whiteware ends up with a hideous UI. People will buy shit, then complain, but it doesn’t change their future purchasing habits (e.g. looking for features, especially useless features!)
I bought a middling brand microwave with knobs that has reasonable usability, despite providing all features. The iPhone is another possible counterexample, although I fucking hate many of their usability decisions (remove all multi-tasking shit from my iPad - I only ever initiate it by mistake and I always struggle to revert my mistake - fucking floating windows and split windows and fucking ... at top of the screen).
Induction stoves powered by natural gas power plants are more efficient than directly cooking with natural gas plus you can use clean solar/wind/nuclear/hydropower or oddballs like geothermal.
For most things which would need cooked on a hob for a long time we use an Instapot electric pressure cooker anyway (out of preference rather than efficiency concern).
At an optimistic 40% efficiency for a stovetop vs 90% for an induction cooktop the breakeven is 25c/kWh which is well above average US electricity prices. Worse that 40% assumes properly sized cookware in contact with the burner, no pilot light, and ignores the cost of venting air outside.
As to total costs, at full blast a propane burner only costs around 1$/hour but some people do a lot of cooking.
Probably the cooktop boots up anew each time because otherwise you would have to be able to reset it when it crashes.